Chapter II: Balloons (3)

They went on like that for quite a long time--gallant lawn-tennis--long base line rallies with an occasional smash. And then he said that he must be indiscreet--specifically so. Why had she come to St. Jean-les-Flots?

It was, she explained meditatively, an escape (he noticed that it was the second time that she had used that word). The Hotel Bungalow was very clean, the food was good, the air was marvellous....

She pulled herself together.

When you took a holiday, she said, you had to make a careful choice between old acquaintances and new ones. Which was likely to be the more tiring? She herself always went to new places at the wrong time of year. Then it was a case of friendship, or nothing. The people who visited watering places out of season were always either impossible or enchanting. Very often amusingly impossible and temporarily enchanting, but so much the better. There is a certain safety in the transitory.

Is Madame married? Maurice asked abruptly. It was the sort of question that had to be asked brusquely, or not at all.

"Yes--No--Yes. That is to say, I have a husband. He will probably come here for a day or two later. He is tres comme il faut."

"Surely you do not blame him for coming to see you."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It is magnificent, but it is not life. One is not always young enough to permit oneself these phantasies. At fifty-six it is silly to waste two days visiting some one you don't want to see. But there, Edmond is like that. Oh! the stability when he says 'my wife.' It is superb. It must be grand, too, when he says 'ma maitresse'; he has the property sense. And how he adores women, woman, all women, any woman. Even sometimes me. And when he doesn't, he keeps the habits. Toujours des petits soins. He never goes out of training, even at home."

"He sounds charming to live with."

"Ah, yes. That is it. He is charming. One cannot bear it. To have the five-finger exercises of his irresistibility played on one. To be the stiff piano on which he practises but never plays. It is too much. And one remembers the days when one was the concert grand. Pouf. It is not agreeable."

There was a pause. Maurice knew that she was going to say a great many other things.

But they had reached the Hotel Bungalow. Regretfully they parted.

He thought that she was a very remarkable woman indeed.

She thought how like her husband he was. Her husband twenty-five years ago.

At dinner she still was in black and white. Black covered with filmy laces, soft and shadowy and mysterious. After dinner they sat on the terrace and looked out at the inky relentless sea.

"Being sensible is no good at all," she said with sudden passion. "Courage is the only helpful virtue; when I married I was young and very pretty and I had thought about life a lot. I knew that in men fidelity had the importance that they gave to it. To a few--very few--it matters--but in most cases unfaithfulness is not a psychological thing at all; it is simply a temporary excess like getting drunk--squalid, if you like--but not touching your real relationships. Women bluff a lot on the subject and many are fools. They believe in the same law for both sexes. It is a ridiculous fallacy. Only Edmond was different. He loved women--_psychologically_. He was therefore inconstant, which is the real sin against marriage. He was a great lover, an artist. Every woman was to him what a canvas is to a painter, a violin to a violinist. The colours and the sounds he got were marvellous. Sometimes he would try impossible subjects--for fun--but always he could bring some sort of harmony out of everything. Ma foi, it amuses me to watch him now--now that it is difficult, and he is fifty-six and I don't love him--but then, when everything was easy and he was twenty-seven and I cared--then it was--well, it was different."

The way that her voice opened and shut reminded him of a sea anemone.

"It is not the way to talk to a stranger, is it?" she said abruptly, "but I feel as if I had known you for a long time. For twenty-five years, to be exact," she added.

Maurice felt curiously tongue-tied. He longed to tell her about Marthe. For the first time in his life he was finding a confidence difficult to make. He wondered why.

"Bon soir, Monsieur," she said, and she walked up to bed with a characteristic lack of pause or hesitation.

Maurice woke up--was woken up--knowing that he had something to look forward to. Sleepily he wondered what it was while patterns spread over his semi-consciousness--dreamily he saw Marthe in a filmy lace dress over black and he felt himself trying to play on a grand piano, every note of which was a sea anemone. Then he woke up completely, and with a delightful rush he remembered Madame and all of the marvellous things that she had told him and all of the significant things he had not yet said to her.

He walked down to breakfast whistling. In the courtyard he patted the dog and lifted the patron's son on to his shoulder, then he asked the patronne if the cook had a name and whether he might some day come and watch her churn butter. In the dining room he praised the coffee, and admired the geraniums. St. Jean-les-Flots must have a particularly fine soil for geraniums, and what air! Why, he felt a different man already.

Madame Marly--he had discovered her name--did not appear till lunch. They bowed to one another, and each talked a little to the waiter. It was delightful to keep their pleasure at arm's length. Coffee on the terrace brought them together.

"You are right," she said, "the country is an impossible place. It makes one talk."

"I love the country," he said.

"And then the sea. It is always going on without you."

"I have a passion for the sea," he murmured.

"I would like to wring the neck of the cook, chloroform the dog, buy Marie Aimee some lawn tennis shoes, and have a daily box of flowers from Paris."

"They shall be ordered at once."

"I should also like," she was looking out to sea, "to fill the hotel with people."

"You flatter me," he murmured.

"Perhaps," she added, "it would be simpler to go away."

"Simpler but impossible."

"Why impossible?"

"The air is unique. The Hotel Bungalow...."

"Please don't," she begged.

"Besides, for the first time in my life I am becoming discreet."

"Ah, no, my friend, believe me. It was merely that you, too, found it difficult to interrupt."

"I did not want to interrupt."

"There you had an advantage over me. I was longing to bring your remarks about the sea to an untimely end."

Her laugh was the most confidential thing in the world. You felt as if she had given you an unlimited credit of intimacy. He thought that she was looking ten years younger in her creamy crepe de Chine dress, with her big straw hat, which seemed to have conquered, without an effort, the perfection and simplicity of the absolute.

"What is it called?" he asked fingering it.

"Crepe surprise."

He asked her to describe its lines, but she refused.

"Ne parlons pas robes," she said.

They decided to go for a drive.

The cocher explained that he had lost his wife, but that "Lisette etait un tres bon petit cheval."

They laughed--at him, at one another, at the sun, at the sea, at everything. He told her about the convolvuluses, and she said he ought to write a book.

He told her his name.

She puckered her forehead a little, and looked to him for help.

He explained rather stiffly that he had written three novels, a book of short sketches, a book of light verse, and a phantasy on Algeria.

She asked what they were called. He told her.

She asked which was the best.

He said that "Sur les Rives" had the best things in it. Perhaps it was less finished than some of the others, but it was on a bigger scale, the conception was more interesting.

She asked what the conception was.

He told her that it was about a woman who, out of affection for her husband, and deep intrinsical virtue, refuses to become the mistress of the man she passionately adores. He goes away and she gives herself to the first person she meets with a look of him. Her original great struggle has exhausted all her powers of resistance.

Madame Marly was silent.

"It is true," she said, "for big things we have big resistances, and for little things little resistances. And so we live our lives in small weak lapses--not driven by hate or love, but by pique or boredom, lowering our flag to salute a pleasure boat, not a battleship. Pouf," she made a little gesture of disgust that he was beginning to know. "We occupy the places that other people make for us. We curl on their divans, we sprawl in their gutters, we sit proudly on the pedestals they put for us, we occupy their altars, and when we are alone, what happens to us? We dissolve into air."

"Not you," he said. "I feel it. You are so independent, so sure. Where are your hesitations? Your very doubts are challenges to truth."

"Challenges to truth," she said. "It is a nice phrase."

Driving back into the sunset they were silent. He wrapped her cloak round her, and once he kissed her hand, but it didn't feel as if it belonged to her. Her thoughts had taken her right away out of his presence, out of the carriage beyond the sunset. Where had they taken her? He wondered.

* * * * *

That night she came down, dressed in glowing apricot--"fold after fold to the fainting air."

As always, her clothes seemed part of her, without ends or beginnings, flowing from her, a streaming enhancing accompaniment. He asked her if her dress were nymphe emue or feuille morte. He was proud of knowing those two names. She said it was neither. He begged her to tell him, but she refused rather abruptly to discuss it. He said he loved her clothes--that he would like to know....

"Pour l'amour de Dieu, ne parlons pas robes."

He wondered at her irritability, but he obeyed.

They went out on to the terrace. The sea was black and angry, all the waves at cross purposes.

"What is your name?"

"Paula."

"What will you say when I tell you that I love you, that I want you?"

"You won't tell me because you will know that I don't want you to."

Her voice was a part of the wind.

"Why don't you want me to?" he was urgent--harsh with desire.

"Because it all happened twenty-five years ago."

He didn't understand.

"Because--because there are some things you can't do twice--like your book, they are the big things that create a strength of resistance. Because they are the beautiful things that belong to our dreams. Because they are of a magic fabric, into which you can weave no facts."

It was dark and he could not see her. The end of his cigarette was a bright spot in the night. The sea and the wind were the counterpoint of her voice.

He felt unreal and remote and small. A tiny strand in the vast design of destiny.

She got up and walked in. He did not move.

* * * * *

"Thank you for the flowers."

The sun was glittering frivolous and cynical.

The box he had ordered from Paris had arrived. First there was a mass of Juliette roses--gilt and velvet--then a staircase of sweet peas, flame-coloured, coral, crimson, magenta, purple, bronze and black.

Both together they drank in the blaze of colour.

Ecstatically he said to her,

"You can't thank _me_, can you? They are too beautiful."

"Perhaps not," she said, "but it was beauty unleashed by you."

He looked at her with adoring eyes. She gave you phrases which lit torches in your soul.

They walked down the beach together. The sea was light and mutinous.

"How untransparent it is," he said, "lapis lazuli and turquoise and chrysoprase--no emeralds or aquamarines, or sapphires."

"How are we to get in our purple without an amethyst?"

"I don't know."

"That is what comes from not reading the Book of Revelations," she said.

They saw big, dissolving, poisonous jellyfish in the sea, mysteriously without lines--and tidy slabs of jellyfish on the beach. They found a starfish, and wondered who came to dance a sword dance round it. They picked up shells that looked as if they had fallen out of fading sunsets or glimmering dawns--they looked into pools of shutting and opening sea anemones.

They never noticed a sardine box or an old boot.

They were happy.

Over her head was a scarlet paper sunshade. It looked like a huge tropical flower.

"Paula," he said--and his eyes opened to her like a magic trap door.

That night they stayed indoors.

"Tell me the things that life has given you," he said, "the things that have made you so rich."

"If I am rich," she said, "it is from the things that _I_ have given."

"Yes," he said, "but why do you impoverish yourself at my expense?"

"Please," she said, "don't talk about that. There are in all of us exposed places--you can call them pain or romance--Sehnsucht or memory--but they are the sanctuaries of our hearts--they cannot be violated."

"Paula," he said, "you have made too much of life. You have made it into the sort of hope that is always a disillusionment."

"Yes," she murmured very low.

"Why were you so unpractical?" his bantering tone revived her.

"I have done for some one (even for you, perhaps) what I have never done for myself;" she was smiling. "I will tell you a story. There was once a man who loved me. He was born with everything--a marvellous name, great riches, beauty, a magnetic quality that I have never seen equalled. I always reproached him with having added nothing to his inheritance--no glory--no achievement--'I have spent,' he would say, shrugging his shoulders. 'Wasted,' I retorted tartly. 'If you like. I have never admitted my past or my future as barriers--or even frontiers--to my actions. I have lived without forethought or arriere pensee--without the weakness of regrets or the stinginess of precautions,' and then he turned to me--his eyes were half shut and his voice was muffled as if a flood were battering on the door of his dispassionateness, 'I have had everything in life except you,' he said. I smiled at him, a little sadly, a little cynically. 'It is I who have given you the greatest gift,' I said. 'I have given you a regret and an illusion. Vous avez donc tout eu.' That night he killed himself."

"And you, Paula, did you feel a murderess?"

"No, a saviour."

* * * * *

She was dressed in pale lilac--the coolest lilac in the world. It rippled round her like loving caressing waves.

"What is your dress called, Paula?"

"Oasis," she said. "'Indian summer' would have been a better name."

"Tell me about it."

"Why do you always want to know?"

"I am writing a book."

"Tant pis."

She was out of temper.

The flowers arrived.

Old-fashioned pink roses, coral carnations, purple stocks, pink pinks, mauve orchids, moss roses, patterned chintz-like phlox.

"Oh!" she said, and for a moment she shut her eyes.

Then:

"Tell me about her," she said.

"Marthe?"

"Is that her name?"

"She is vibrant."

"But of course. What does she look like?"

"Her hair is like a dirty new coin. You feel that you could polish it into brightness. Her eyes are like tea--yellow camomile tea. Her mouth is big and rather grave. There are electric waves of aliveness running all through her."

"I do not like her."

"No?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"All that irrelevant, interfering vitality. It is dangerous."

"And slumbering, mysterious magnetism, is that not dangerous?"

"That, too."

There was a thunderstorm and the air got cool.

Madame Marly had a headache and dined in her room.

* * * * *

The next day was grey--grey air, a grey sky, a grey countryside, a grey sea--not luminous, lustrous grey, but opaque chiffon drawn across the world.

Paula's flowers had arrived--lemon-coloured hollyhocks, blue and mauve and purple delphiniums, filmy love-in-the-mist, primrose antirrhinums, snowy Madonna lilies with golden middles, huge creamy roses, tiny yellow rosebuds, straggling larkspurs.

She was dressed in a grey whipcord coat and skirt with a grey swathed turban. She looked distant--on the brink of disappearance--not so much as if she were going to travel but as if she were going to vanish.

She regarded the flowers with grave concentration. It was as if she felt for them a stern passionate devotion. She took one of the white roses and stroked it--as if it were a shy mother with her first child. Then she said:

"I want to go for a long walk."

They walked for miles and miles. The mist sprinkled her hair with dew-drops. It looked quite white. Her eyes were deep and brooding and you couldn't catch them.

"Paula," Maurice said, "how remote you are."

"Am I?" she said. And it made her more remote than ever.

He walked desperately, as if each step were an obstacle painfully overcome. She walked with a swaying unconscious rhythm, as if she did not know what she was doing.

She cut off his perfunctory attempts at conversation with a monosyllable. When they got home they were both tired.

They each decided to have a hot bath and rest before dinner.

She was dressed in very severe perfect black, marvellous lines, waiting to be sculpted.

He told her so.

She pursed her lips.

They sat in front of the fire in the hall.

"Tell me a little more about your husband?" he said.

"What can I tell you? I know him so well. You see, I have loved him and hated him--I have become indifferent to him--and I appreciate him. But I have had nothing from him that a hundred other people have not had--except, perhaps, his name."

"Marly?"

She looked at him in amazement.

"Marly?" she laughed. "Marly is not even my own name. We are all of us so very monogamous when we love, proprietary, exclusive, jealous, whatever you like to call it. Edmond's character was like a pergola. You walked in and out. There were always roses and jasmine, clematis and wisteria, peeps of the garden and patches of the sky--but never a shut door--never one. Oh," there was a breaking passion in her voice--"how I longed for four walls, for a lock and key, for a dungeon, for bars. 'Don't you know,' I would say to him, 'that much trodden territory becomes neutral?' and he would smile and say, 'you are generous.'"

Maurice was looking into the fire.

"Poor little Paula," he said. "But you were his only wife."

"Yes," she said, "a law-given copyright."

"Paula," he said, "will you do something for me?"

"I wonder. There are surely no somethings where we are concerned."

"I want you to describe several dresses to me. Your own perfect divine dresses. I want them for my book."

"So I am to be made use of, am I?"

Her eyes were flashing.

He was not looking at her.

"Yes," he said, "I am going to steal some of your genius."

She had left him. He was not surprised. She never said "Good-night."

The next day she had gone--very early, leaving no address, no letter.

She had, he heard, left his box of flowers at the village infirmary. He knew that that day it was to have been full of verbena, sweet geranium, sweet briar, thyme, myrtle, lavender and single roses....

* * * * *

Marthe had insisted that he should come with her to Lally. He was feeling foolish and fascinated--dressing was evidently a religion with the most solemn rites in the world. The gravity and concentration of every one astounded him--the firm vendeuse refusing to allow her cliente any freedom of choice. The pathetic cliente pining in vain for forbidden fruit--the hopelessly ugly and unrewarding, who alone were permitted to follow their fancies. Patterns were discussed in hushed but intense undertones, faint but all-important modifications were offered by the vendeuse to bridge the gulf between the figures of the mannequins and those of the clients. The brave longing of a squat pigeon to have the model reproduced "textuellement" was resolutely suppressed.

Marthe was discussing her vendeuse's child....

And then suddenly Maurice saw Madame Marly. She was without a hat and scattering her terrified staff with her eye.

She came straight to him, her voice was mocking.

"Maintenant, je peux donner des renseignements a Monsieur."

"I did not know," he blurted, "I had no idea," and then as the ultimate significance of their meeting disentangled itself from the immediate embarrassment,

"Thank God, I have found you."

* * * * *

Mlle. de Marveau married the Comte de Cely.

The Comtesse de Cely wanted an escape and became Madame Lalli.

Madame Lalli wanted an escape and became Madame Marly--for Paula was always Paula.

And then she met Maurice and her youth. Twenty-five years of age and experience and disappointment fell from her. But to keep her great illusion she offered her big resistance....

And then the tiny knife turned in the tiny wound. The unconscious buzzing machine touched the exposed nerve--the silly, absurd, irrelevant name.

The lover in pursuit of the beloved became the novelist examining the dressmaker, seeking for information. When professional meets professional.

This time she capitulated for she ran away.

* * * * *

That night Maurice wrote to her.

"Paula, I love you. I loved you always. I loved you invulnerable, wise, fortified beyond the wiles of men. How much more do I love you now with your one weak spot--so weak, so absurd that it can only be kissed, and laughed at and adored.

"Paula, my own, the twenty-five years have never existed. There is only one immortal moment--and that is to come.

"Beloved, best beloved, only beloved, I want you so badly.

"MAURICE.

"Besides, you have got to describe me several dresses for my new book."

XIII

AULD LANG SYNE

[_To HAROLD NICOLSON_]

It was delightful to be back in England after two and a half years. Two and a half years of India, of pomp and circumstance and being envied, of heat and homesickness and loneliness. How starved she had felt--starved of little intellectual coteries with their huge intellectual sensations--starved of new books and old pictures and music, of moss roses and primroses and bluebell woods, starved even into the selfishness of coming home, urged away by Robert, who did not know how to be selfish. Thinking of him made her feel very tender and very small. His iron public spirit, his inevitable devotion to duty, unconscious and instinctive and uncensorious, combined with a guilty sense that her youth and beauty had been uprooted by him, and put into a dusty distant soil. He was more convinced than any one of the importance of books and music and intellectual interests (he never read and did not know one note from another) because they were important to her and had therefore received a consecration they could never have had by merely being important to him. It was all so very simple--What she admired was beautiful; what she laughed at was funny; what she loved was divine--And she belonged to him--Robert. It was a miracle that found him every night on his knees in humble gratitude. She had, he thought, been so wonderfully good, walking on his red baize carpets as if they were fields of flowers, learning Sanscrit with passion and pretending, with what seemed to him complete success, and to them, absolute failure, that she liked Anglo-Indian women. When one by one his staff were incapacitated by love, he never complained. It made them of course useless, but how could they help falling in love with her? It would have been so unnatural if they had not. And when she told him--and to do her justice she knew that she was telling him the truth--that she was not worthy to do up his shoe laces--he would laugh and kiss her hand and send up a little internal prayer to God to be able to do something to deserve his wife.

No wonder he was always urging her to go home--haunted as he was by the feeling of having put her in a prison and, no wonder, not having his iron character, she had finally succumbed--as she so often succumbed to his unselfishness.

How she was loving England! The wet, heavy air--the sky curtained with clouds--the drenched leaves--the saturated flowers--the damp breathing earth--the distant lethargic sun. She could feel a pulse in the sopping soil and her heart beat with it.

Finding her friends too was such an adventure. What struck her most about them was that they seemed so stationary. There they were, just as she had left them, doing the same things, thinking the same things, saying the same things--fixed points with their lives revolving round them, seeming to have lost the capacity for independent motion.

She and Robert were not like that. Thank God, they were still pilgrims. After all, her life had been a big spacious thing in spite of India, because of India and, even more, because of Robert. Only she did not want to think about it now. Just to go on repeating to herself: "I'm at home. I'm in England."

And she was going to stay with St. John. How excited she would have been four years ago. How her heart had beaten when she heard his footsteps, how she had thrilled when he had said "dear" to her. She remembered the care he had taken of her, the beautiful considerate devotion he had always shown her when she was longing so passionately for other things, trying with all her might and main to make him lose his head. _How_ badly she had behaved. She could wonder now dispassionately whether he had _ever_ been in love with her. On the whole, she thought, he never had. If she had not been married--it was a silly "if." The most he had said was "you make things very difficult," not a very satisfactory avowal when you came to think it over calmly. But she remembered how it had thrilled her at the time--what a blank cheque of possibilities it had seemed. She remembered, too, the evening when he had talked seriously to her--very gently, very tenderly, very gravely. She had thought he was going to say, "I don't want to be made unhappy," and, instead, he had said, "I don't want you to be unhappy." That had been a nasty one. How she had lashed him with her tongue! What inexhaustible reserves of icy acid she had brought forward.

She had tried to hurt him as much as ever she could. How hurt had he been? She wondered. It was all such very ancient history. And yet he had gone on being fond of her. Fonder and fonder--men were so odd.

So many things had happened since then. She had been away and he had lost an uncle and inherited a property. And now she was going to stay with him. Last time they had met, two years ago, he had talked to her as if they had had a boy and girl affair thirty years before. She had been very much amused but she had hidden it; hiding your amusement was an essential part of being fond of St. John--a rule of the game, so to speak. That was one of the delightful things about him; to like him at all you had to be really devoted to him and when you had reached that stage, all of the qualities that would have been intolerable in other people became subtly lovable. Somehow they seemed to creep under your wing, compelling you to give them the protection of your own intimate understanding. It was impossible not to make pets of St. John's defects. Ariadne remembered the way he had always tried to keep her out of moral draughts, how he had hated to see her in a room with any one of a doubtful reputation, how her habit of taking off her hat in motors in towns got on his nerves.

"But if it tires my head," she would say, and he would explain very seriously what an intimate gesture it was.

Then as she always rested before dinner, people would come to tea with her in her bedroom. St. John didn't like it at all. There was to him something inherently disreputable about the horizontal. If she were too tired to sit up in an armchair, she was too tired to see any one--except him, of course, who understood her (which was just what he didn't do).

"But my back does ache so easily. After all, if I were really ill you wouldn't mind."

"That is different."

"How ill do I have to be before I can abdicate the perpendicular in the presence of a young man?" He consoled himself with the thought that she was extremely, exceptionally innocent. She told him that thousands of people were extremely, exceptionally innocent. It was a fact which could never be explained to juries. St. John doubted it. He believed in a vast number of rules to which all of the people he liked and most of the people he knew were exceptions.

The train drew up at the platform. Ariadne got out. The footman explained to her that his Lordship was so very sorry not to be able to come to the station, but he was attending a cattle show.

"Of course," said Ariadne, and she felt it.

She got into the brougham--it was so characteristic of St. John not to use a motor in the country--which had that delightful, almost forgotten, smell of broughams, and drove through an avenue of oaks up to the fine old Georgian house, dignified and mellow and lived in--a house proud of its cellar and its stables--of its linen and its silver--a house where men were men and women were women--where the master hunted and sat on the Bench, and the mistress embroidered and looked after the household--each having his separate functions and the one joint one of propagating the race.

In the hall, St. John's housekeeper, in a black taffetas apron, welcomed her.

"His Lordship would be most distressed not to have been there when her ladyship arrived, but the cattle show----"

"Of course," said Ariadne, and hinted at a quite special awareness of the importance of Cattle Shows.

Her bedroom was immense--there were lavender bags in all the drawers, and flowers on the dressing table, the fire was lit and there was boiling water in the shiny pale brass can. Her maid, the housekeeper explained, was sleeping in the dressing room. On the table by her bed was a glass box of biscuits, "The Wrong Box," "Omar Khayyam" and Lucas Malet's last novel.

Ariadne was smiling with happiness. Talk about the joys of the unexpected, can they compare with the joys of the expected, of finding everything delightfully and completely what you knew it was going to be? There was a tap at the door.

"Come in."

"It's I." (St. John never said "It's me.")

She threw open the door.

"Do come in," she said, and then, with a little stab of extra pleasure, she wondered if he would be shocked by her flimsy pink dressing gown and her bare feet.

"St. John," she put out both her hands. "I _am_ happy to be here."

He took them and held them quite tight, then he kissed them.

"Little Ariadne," he said.

It was, she supposed, a way of getting over the dressing gown.

"You look younger than ever," he said.

"It's my hair being down," she murmured.

He asked her if she had had a good journey, and whether the housekeeper had seen that she had everything she wanted.

She asked him if the cattle show had been a success.

He said he really must dress for dinner, and so must she.

"Ariadne," he put his hand on her arm, "it's good to have you here."

There was an emotion welling up in his voice that surprised her. He turned his back and left the room rather hurriedly. She realised that he had almost kissed her. Would he have said, "I'm sorry, but you looked such a baby," or, "Forgive me, it was seeing you again after so long," or, "Ariadne, can you forgive me? I lost my head."

She plumped for the baby, and wondered if the visit could conceivably be going to be a slight strain. In old days there had always been a certain tenseness about their relationship, made worse by her attempts to topple over his gentlemanliness. She had felt that if her wish could have been gratified just once, she would have been released from it and never have wanted to repeat the experiment. Also a little of the responsibility would have been his--thus obliterating the irritating daily spectacle of his untarnished blamelessness.

Of course he had never been in love with her. She had always been buoyed up by little things she wouldn't even have noticed in some one she hadn't cared about. If there were acute disquieting moments when the troublante quality of her loveliness tossed him about unmercifully--weren't they moments that any stranger might go through sitting next to her at dinner? No--the truth always had been that he was really fond of her.

"I'm glad now," she smiled to herself, "how lucky that we can't always sculpt our own relationships."

She went down to dinner--in the huge hall full of armchairs and cushions and antlers and comfort St. John stood with his back to the fire smoking a cigarette which he threw into the grate when he saw her (St. John invariably threw away his cigarette when you came into the room and then asked your permission to light a new one. In her mind's eye Ariadne always saw him opening the door for his wife after a violent scene with her).

"My dear," she said, "what a divine house."

"The wing you are sleeping in was built by the fifth Lord....

"The staircase was designed by....

"The mantelpieces in the drawing room....

"After dinner I will show you...."

Dinner was announced.

She tucked her hand under his arm.

"Are you going to take me in to dinner, St. John?"

"Of course," he smiled at her.

The dining room was big enough to reduce the immense pieces of Georgian silver--beautiful they were--to reasonable proportions.

St. John said there were some very fine pieces of Queen Anne which he would show her.

"There was," she murmured, "nothing like Queen Anne."

The attentiveness of the footman and even of the butler did not seem to her to be entirely confined to their wants.

St. John asked her questions about India, which she answered as she answered travelling Europeans--correctly, concisely, and without any frills of vocabulary. It was quite possible, she reflected, that St. John wanted to know the answers to his questions. That was the worst of being abroad so much, you were always either trying to tell things it bored people to hear, or else they were determined to hear things that it bored you to tell. Her mind wandered to the curious tide-like quality of interest, the way it advanced and retreated in a conversation.

St. John was explaining what a quiet life he had led. Perhaps, to her, it would have even seemed dull. (This to him was rhetorical paradox, and to her an obvious truth.) She did not know, he said, what it meant to feel that the land belonged to you--to see your own flowers growing, your own calves being born--to feel yourself surrounded by your own people, for whose happiness and welfare you were responsible.

Ariadne said that inheritance was a sacred trust (it was wonderful how easy she found it to talk like St. John).

"Yes," he said, "that is just it--a sacred trust. Why, I hardly ever go up to London now, and when I do, I feel quite homesick till I get here again."

They got up from dinner.

"Shall we go and sit in the library?" he said.

They sat one on either side of the fire. She felt like an ancestress or a family portrait. The rosy haze of her tea-gown looked strange and alien fluttering in the huge leather armchair.

"What a wisp you look," St. John said. She remembered how satisfactory her tininess had always been to him. "I think I could blow you away with a puff of smoke."

"I am a limpet really," she laughed, "think how I have stuck to your life."

"Thank God," he affirmed fervently.

"Are you still a great flirt, St. John?"

He looked at her in amazement.

"You have surely not forgotten the way you played fast and loose with me?"

"Ariadne," he was using the firm voice she knew so well, "you mustn't talk like that."

"But you did. Don't you remember that dinner you gave when we went to the L----'s ball and you never danced with me till seventeen minutes past one?"

"My dear, I was saving you up. The joy after all the duties."

"You never told me so."

"There were a lot of things I never told you."

"I tried so hard to make you."

"It was so hard not to."

"St. John," she said, "the things you didn't tell me, were they true?"

"Yes, they were true."

He had got up and knelt by her chair.

She put her hand on his head.

"St. John," she said. Should she tell him that they were not true? That he was building up a retrospective passion which had never existed? That what he supposed to have been renunciation and self-control and chivalry had in reality been a rather tactfully steered uninflammable affection? Why his voice now was far more broken up and moved than she had ever heard it before. Of course he had not been in love with her. She had never realised it as clearly as to-night. For a moment he put his face in her lap, then he kissed her hands--reverently, in memory of his great sacrifice.

"May I smoke a cigarette?" he asked.

"Please do."

He went back to his chair.

She was, he said, a wonderful friend.

So, she said, was he.

They talked about his family and her family--a little about their mutual friends and a lot about friends of his that she had never seen.

They talked about furniture and gardens.

There were, he said, a lot of subjects on which he wanted her advice.

It was all very domestic, their two armchairs and the fire--the dying fire. He must, she supposed, be imagining that they were married, seeing her at the head of the table, in the family pew. She wondered if he would have let her re-set the family jewels. Perhaps his mind had reached the nursery. He was dreaming of children, his children, her children, their children.

Dear St. John. She looked at him tenderly. She longed to explain what an unsuitable wife she would have made him.

"What are you thinking about?" her voice was very gentle.

"I was thinking of the cattle I bought to-day, and wondering what sort of fencing I should put up at the bottom of the drive. Ariadne, you remember how gregarious I used to be; well, you can't think how perfectly happy I am living here alone."

Smiles were popping out of her face shamelessly. No sooner had she kept one out of her eyes than it reappeared on her lips.

"Dear St. John," she said, "I do love you."

He looked, she thought, a little alarmed.

"Not like that, that is all over."

"Quite over?"

"Quite--are you glad?"

"If it makes you happier," and then, "No, I'm damned if I'm glad."

"Thank you, St. John," she was laughing a little.

He looked puzzled, even rather disappointed.

She had broken the rules and laughed.

"How lucky you didn't say that to me four years ago."

"Don't," he said sharply.

"I'm sorry."

He was lighting her candle.

"To-morrow," he said, "you will choose the colour of the garden gates and advise me about the fencing."

"That _will_ be fun."

She shivered.

"Are you cold?"

"One is always cold after India."

He took her to the door of her bedroom.

"Good-night--God bless you," he said.

She put her two hands on his shoulders and, bending forward, she kissed him lightly. It was a cruel way of showing him that she didn't care any more.

"What a revengeful woman I am, punishing him after all these years," she thought.

But he didn't see it like that.

"I think I deserve her trust," he said to himself, and then his thoughts, let out to graze, returned to the subject of fences.

"Robert," wrote Ariadne, "I am homesick for India."

XIV

TWO TAXI DRIVES

[_To PAUL MORAND_]